What’s the point of making comedy that reminds everyone how awful things are? For the first time in Nish Kumar’s work, a note of uncertainty is sounded in his new show about the value of the ex-Mash Report man’s project. For better or worse, he is the pre-eminent comic polemicist of our age, the joker to whom lefties turn, and others revile, for his righteous tirades against racism, neoliberalism and the Tories. But what drove Nish to this, where has it left him – and what good does it do?
No such questions trouble the first section of Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe, which begins – as his previous show did – with a headlong political rant (“like a podcast at double speed”) that elicits cheers as much for vehemence as wit. Here, Sunak, Patel and Braverman are taken down by a British Asian man outraged that they’re supposed to represent him, an already well-worn joke is cracked about Liz Truss killing the Queen, and alternative outcomes are delicately considered (“I will not be Tenacious D’d!”) to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
There’s political commentary after the interval too – on Gaza, on the messianic delusions of the billionaire class. But increasingly, Kumar’s own mental wellbeing (first broached in 2022’s Your Power, Your Control) takes centre stage. He’s in therapy for anxiety, prone to outbursts of rage (a funny one is directed at Boris Johnson’s motorcade), and experiencing, on the brink of his 40s, intimations of mortality. Admitting – and sending up – his own tendency to arrogance, there are self-regarding routines about dust-ups with Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais, and about his supposed constitutional inability to write workaday comedy about the contents of his fridge.
Does it work, Nish’s new navel-gazing direction? It does, on balance, fleshing out the politics with a picture of an anxious man, clinging to political conviction, and his audience, to quell the fretful voices in his head. We get more bang for our buck: intelligent black-comic polemic, plus verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown histrionics from the least Zen man alive. State of the nation comedy as ever, then – but state of the Nish too.
